Blade Symphony, a sword-fighting game from Puny Human powered by the Source Engine has officially released for Linux today.

The Linux release comes at the same time as the game receiving a massive update called Harmonious Prelude. There's so many things that have changed, it would be completely silly for me to list them all here. It's quite a different game, but you don't need to take my word for it as it's also free to try for a few days!

I haven't had a lot of time with it, as each time I participated in their testing it had issues in the Linux build. However, the most recent update this week should have solved that issue.

After testing it, I can confirm that most of the Linux crash bugs I encountered during testing are now gone and it performs reasonably well. Although it did quit to the desktop when I adjusted the AA setting in the video options. Training performs exceptionally well but online play is not as smooth, due to the bigger and prettier environments. To be fair though, I do have my settings pretty high and it's very much playable.

I actually quite like it, while the combat is certainly a learning experience it's simple enough to pick up and play and not be completely terrible. One of those systems where a good few hours of play will teach you some advanced tricks to pull. I especially like the online mode where you can spectate and join matches whenever you feel like it, like a social hub with a fighting game inside it's pretty sweet.

As a reminder, gamepad support in the game is basically non existent. Even though it has an option for it, their system for it is nowhere near ready so stick to keyboard and mouse for now.

There's still plenty of rough edges, but it's definitely an interesting game to try out. We've needed more fighting games, so it's great that Puny Human put the work in to support Linux.

It has cross-platform multiplayer, so you can play with anyone across Linux, Mac and Windows. If you decide you like it, the purchase price has also been utterly slashed with 80% off. For those interested, we will likely arrange some games over the weekend to give it a thorough test. Feel free to join us in our Discord Channel if you're interested in grouping up.

Eventually, it will be going free to play. This release includes some of the preparation they wanted to do, but not all of it.

Update: For those who couldn't launch it during the free period, after a chat they've solved that. However, the tutorial and online games simply do not work at this time as they infinite load, which I've also given them feedback on. Update 28/09/19: The issues have been solved.

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So much potential. I like it a lot, but the moves don't feel as responsive as I'd hope. Something very similar like Jedi Academy, which is open source on Linux, feels far more tactile and tactical in its Swordplay than this. I also like, via Proton, Clone Drones in the Danger Zone...

Edit: with native steam integration enabled it works... but then I need to figure out how to fix my controller with it

I had so many gaming hiccups with Solus, especially with Wine (plus some updates breaking my install) that I moved off Solus entirely. If you like Budgie, though, consider Ubuntu Budgie (what I run to game) or Manjaro Budgie...

What gaming hiccups? Solus devs try to maintain compatibility with native Steam games as much as possible; if you had "hiccups" with specific games, you could just file a bug report (we even have "Steam compatibility" tag for such tasks) or ask on IRC for help.
As of Wine - Solus doesn't target Wine gaming. Our Wine is just a regular development version with only one experimental patch that enables Gallium9. I think, nowadays most Wine gamers use wine-staging.

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